A Hymn to Childhood
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned
to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the
backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
The one presided over by armed
men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and
alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a
new era,
and the house around you grew
bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with
more and more
people missing?
The photographs whispered to
each other
from their frames in the
hallway.
The cooking pots said your
name
each time you walked past the
kitchen.
And you pretended to be dead
with your sister
in games of rescue and
abandonment.
You learned to lie still so
long
the world seemed a play you
viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming,
the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother’s china.
Don’t fall asleep.
Each act opens with your
mother
reading a letter that makes
her weep.
Each act closes with your
father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.
Which childhood? The one that
never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to
grow.
Still talking to God and
thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God
listening,
and winter is the
high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one
eye
an ocean wave in octaves and
minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to
say Me.
Which childhood?
The one from which you’ll
never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don’t know.
Still thinking you hear low
song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at
evening,
and plentitude in the unseen
bird
tolling at morning. Still slow
to tell
memory from imagination,
heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both
of them
from dreaming.
OUR WORDS THIS WEEK:
attic
missing
rescue
fingers
plentitude
